


Virtual chocolate

by Sealie



Series: sga/traders [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Traders (TV 1995)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-21
Updated: 2006-05-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sealie/pseuds/Sealie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stargate Atlantis/Traders crossover no' 3 [voyage par mer segment]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Virtual chocolate

**Author's Note:**

> _**Virtual chocolate (SGA/Traders xo) no 3/10**_  
>  Fandom: Stargate Atlantis/Traders xo [voyage par mer segment]  
> Rating: PG – there be swearing ahead.  
> Spoilers: none  
> beta: LKY

**Virtual chocolate**

  
By Sealie

Grant snuck out of the SGC infirmary bathroom, crossed the expanse of the ward and dove back into bed.

Safe.

He burrowed under the blankets and pulled them up to his chin. The angry lady -- Dr. Lam -- was talking to the general on the other side of the infirmary. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her chin was raised. The general looked directly at her when he talked, not the slightest distraction in his gaze. The edges of the general’s aura gingerly extended, wanting to intersect with the colourless spiky edges of Dr. Lam’s aura, but her razor sharp edges made him flare blood-red with every careful probe.

“Yes, sir,” she said flatly.

The boundaries of General Landry’s aura retracted so fast that Grant winced. He clasped his hands over his ears and shifted his focus to his cousin. Rodney was on the bed next to Grant’s. Under a pile of blankets, Rodney was an unformed huddle of comfort. The hand with a sharp IV stuck in its back was curled by his face, so it looked as if he was nibbling on his fingertips. Mr. Jinx was wrapped, head around tail, in the hollow formed behind Rodney’s bent knees. They both looked content.

Grant smiled.

A clatter jerked his attention away from Rodney. Four nurses in painfully bright, white uniforms rolled a gurney into the infirmary. Dr. Lam raced forward calling out instructions. Another two soldiers entered with a bleeding man slung between them.

Grant had had enough; everyone was a little bit too spiky. His skin was starting to prickle. He kicked off the blanket and set his bare feet on the cold floor. That was nasty. Slithering off the bed, he settled before the tiny bedside cabinet. The change of clothes that Flyboy had brought him were carefully folded and set neatly on the top shelf. Grant pulled on Rodney’s favourite blue fleece over his white scrub top. Grabbing his wallet, he stuffed it in the front pocket. His scrub trousers were too thin, so he kicked them off and pulled on a brand new pair of jeans. The folds were sharp like the edges of a tightly nipped piece of paper. Grant lay on the floor and pulled them over his hips. Hordes of feet on the other side of Rodney’s bed rushed back and forth, stamp, stomp, skid, pattern-less and painful. Grant shivered. He grabbed a white pair of sneakers, tucked his hands in them and crawled under the bed, alongside the wall. Edging around banks of equipment, he slowly made his way to the open doorway. On hands and knees, ever so carefully placing the sneakers one after another, he snuck behind the man watching Dr. Lam. The man stood tall with a gun hanging off the carabineer on his waistcoat of clips and fasteners.

Grant’s thoughts fractured and repaired.

Outside the infirmary on the floor were lines of colour radiating away. The yellow one turned down the left hand corridor, the green one went right and the red one went straight ahead.

Slowly, Grant stood. He dropped his shoes to the floor and inserted his long toes in -- wiggling until one foot was settled. Grant contemplated the colours. Yellow, red and green. No blue, he noted. He liked blue. Red sometimes was angry. But it also was vibrant and full of life.

Grant toed on his other shoe and walked forwards.

Red was important. He was careful to stay within the line, placing one foot precisely in front of the other ensuring that he didn’t fall off the edges. Someone laughed at him, but he was used to that, as he picked his way towards the line’s destination. The right angled turns were a bit hard to navigate.

“Dr. McKay?”

Grant lifted his head from the contemplation of the line of red. A lot of people seemed to confuse him with Rodney. Some people just didn’t know how to look closely.

“Grant.”

“Yes, sir, I got the grant.”

Vaguely, Grant registered warm brown eyes and a mop of startling wild curly hair which had been tamed into tessellating hexagonal braids. More interesting was the laptop that the man angled towards him.

“We’ve been running a parallel series diagnostic on the Stargate trying to incorporate the presupposed redundancies that Colonel Carter found necessary to overlook when first initialising the Stargate to see if it is the source of an identified error.” The man took a deep breath. “I was coming to see you in the infirmary. I thought you were in the infirmary?”

Grant’s fingers twitched and he reached for the laptop. Braid man released the laptop without hesitation. Bracing the laptop on his forearm as carefully as holding a vulnerable baby’s neck, Grant squinted at the streams of numbers.

“Bad, bad. Hmmm.” Grant let his fingers tap over the keys, checking the laptop’s programs. A few key strikes opened a visual representation of the data stream. It was incomplete, unformed. “There’s not enough processing power in this computer.”

The man stuttered. “I know… I was uhm… I thought it best to bring this to… We could go to the Cray, the data’s uploaded.”

“Cray?” Grant rocked from foot to foot eagerly.

“Uhm… yeah, we have Cray X-0A. We updated the serial Cray X 1E. It’s a petascale Cray.”

Visions of chocolate danced through Grant’s head. “Where is it?”

  
~*~

Carter entered the Stargate control room as the event horizon settled in the gate room below. Walter was leaning back on his chair watching McKay and Dr. Storey working at the bank of Cray computers along the left hand side wall, or more accurately Dr. Storey was watching McKay opened mouthed.

“Solved!” Gleefully, McKay leaped to the Cray dual keyboard interface and, with the virtuoso of the pianist he once professed to aspire too, began to programme.

Carter raised her chin to better focus from a distance on the Cray screen. It appeared that McKay was using Python 2.4.2. with a few personal programming language quirks thrown in for good measure.

“Ma’am.” Walter held up a clipboard with a hard copy of the last hour’s activity report.

Carter glanced through the line of numbers showing the primary data stream, immediately registering the glitch that Dr. Storey had been charged with identifying. She leaned over Walter and consulted the real time data stream on the monitor to check the glitch, which smoothed before her eyes.

It appeared that McKay was helping the younger scientist. It struck Carter as a bit uncharacteristic.

McKay stepped back from the Cray and cocked his head to the side. He muttered disconnectedly under this breath. Carter couldn’t make out the words. A perplexed expression crossed McKay’s face and he executed a long limbed crab walk to the right and another which brought him directly before the main windows which looked down on the Stargate.

“Discrete wavelets,” he announced. “Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

“McKay? Are you all right?” Carter asked.

McKay glanced back at the Cray, the laptop that Dr. Storey held and then back to the initiated Stargate. SG-15 walked through the event horizon into the embarkation room.

“Why haven’t they frozen to death?”

“Because the stage modulations of their component atoms are artificially vibrated so that they do not approach absolute zero,” Carter supplied automatically. “Which you knew already.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re such a…” Carter focussed on the man, he was crouched in on himself, hands curled up to his chest, head canted to the side as he watched her through impossibly long eyelashes.

“Hello.” A shy smile crossed his face.

“Who the hell are you?” Carter automatically reached for her field issued Beretta, which of course was not holstered at her side. The three security officers stationed throughout the control room responded to her movement, unslinging their SIG P-226s and aiming at the intruder with satisfying speed and precision. “Sergeant Pritchett. Arrest this man.”

“No! No… no.” The alien metamorph, camouflaged goa’uld (possibly even wraith) or human with a chameleon device backed up rapidly, hands outstretched. His eyes darted to the left and right, hunting for an escape. “Braids invited me.”

Walter reached for the SCC intercom and made a station wide announcement of a possible alien incursion in the control room. Sirens wailed.

“On the floor.” Sergeant Pritchett took a measured step forward, moving threateningly but staying outside the reach of the intruder.

“I’m Grant. I’m Grant. I’m not Rodney!” the man squealed. He jerked towards the exit.

Carter made an instant decision. “Contain him.”

Pritchett took the stranger down like a ton of bricks, face planted on the floor in the space of a heartbeat. The sergeant’s arm lock immobilised him. The other two security staff kept their weapons trained on the man.

“Search him,” Carter ordered.

Pritchett hauled the man to his feet and then nodded at his fellow airman, who checking that the third guard kept them covered, proficiently patted the intruder. Peculiarly, once firmly contained, the man seemed to relax in the Pritchett’s tight grasp.

“Ma’am.” The security officer passed over a wallet.

Three other airmen entered the control room, scoping the situation they stood at the fringes waiting for orders from the officer in charge.

Carter flicked through the leather wallet pulling out a “Grant Jansky’s” credit and business card for a company in Toronto, Canada. A security swipe card showed a picture of the man before her. Why would an alien in the SGC, who was pretending to be McKay, have a derivatives consultant’s business and security card belonging to a total stranger, Carter wondered.

“Who are you?” Carter asked.

“Grant.”

At the back of the wallet where bills should live was a sheaf of well-thumbed photos. Sam extracted the first one and grinned.

“Who’s this?” Sam asked even though she now knew the answer. Two boys stood as close as skin, knock-kneed and grinning cheekily with wide, wide mouths. The photo was faded, but Sam would have laid a bet that the eyes framed by those long lashes were sea blue. The shock of light, curly hair was a practical joke waiting to happen. Sam’s day wouldn’t be complete if she couldn’t get a scan of this photo and post it on the SGC intranet.

“Colonel Carter, should we cancel the alert?” Walter spoke up.

Carter nodded. “Yes. I’m not entirely sure how he got in here, but I don’t think Mr. Jansky is an alien.”

The siren silenced immediately, and Walter’s calm measured tones announced that there had been a false alarm.

Grant leaned out of the airman’s grasp to peer at the upside down, dog-eared photograph. “That’s me and Rodney at Mrs. Anderson’s, before Rodney went back to Auntie Ruthie and I went into the ‘system’ never to get out.”

“That’s Rodney all right, but there isn’t an ounce of fat on him. On either of you,” Sam smiled.

“Jeannie was a bit skinny too, but Auntie Ruthie liked her more so she got treats sometimes.” Carter’s fingers flicked through the sheaf of photos and withdrew a second photo of three stick-thin creatures staring at the lens, the downward slanting mouths were as belligerent as sin. The contrast between the two photos was horrible.

“The…”

“Auntie Ruthie wasn’t well, but she got medication and got better. And then Jeannie and Rodney had to go back and live with her. But I was her only her nephew and I didn’t go back.” Grant looked at her directly. “I think I was the lucky one.”

“What are you doing here?” Carter asked.

“Get your hands off my cousin!” McKay bellowed.

The scientist blew into the control room riding a wave of ire. Even dressed in white scrub pyjamas, bare footed and one cheek sleep-creased, the force of his presence was not reduced in the slightest.

“You!” He pointed at the security officer holding Grant. “Stand down this instant.”

The dark-haired airman simply regarded Colonel Carter. She gave no such order.

“Hello, Rodney,” Carter said easily.

“Tell your dull-witted underling to release my cousin immediately.” His eyes narrowed furiously.

“I’d actually like to know what a civilian is doing in a high security area like the control room?”

“It’s none of my concern why your asinine Air Force security procedures don’t work. Release Grant now,” McKay countered.

Grant lifted his chin. “Rodney,” he said with a hint of trepidation.

“He’s my cousin,” McKay explained in the face of that nervousness. “Carson… Dr. Beckett brought us to the SCG to investigate a possible case of contagion. He’s not a security risk and he’s not responsible for an idiotic excuse of a mathematician mistaking him for me.” McKay pointed at Dr. Storey who had almost made it to the opposite exit from the control room. McKay then turned the laser glare of his attention to the security officer holding his cousin. “Release him now, or know the consequences.”

“Ma’am?” The officer remained impassive, but a hint of nervousness coloured the air.

“Sam!” McKay stepped forward and yanked his cousin bodily free from the guard as Carter nodded.

Freed from the security officer’s grip, Grant came alive and latched onto his cousin.

“It’s a wormhole. It can’t be an Einstein-Rosen it has to be Lorentzian. Rodney, is it an inter- or intra-universe wormhole? It’s not calibrated very well,” Grant said, his nose burrowed in McKay chest.

“Yes, I know. I keep telling them,” McKay returned smugly.

“But it violates Einsteinian causality.” Grant lifted his head. “How does it stay open in non-relativistic space?”

Carter raised her hand and made an abrupt cutting motion. “Mr. Janksy does not have clearance.”

“He discerned more in a two minute study of the Stargate than the retarded gnomes that you have have managed in three years of study,” McKay said pithily.

“It is just a mathematical solution to general relativity,” Grant said innocently. Turning in McKay’s arms, he looked at the Stargate. “Something inherent in that structure must allow the wormhole to stay open. But it has to be constructed of an element which doesn’t exist on this planet.”

Carter threw her hands in the air.

~*~

 _Epilogue_

“Is Mr. Jansky capable of signing and understanding the provisions of a confidentiality agreement?” General Landry asked.

Rodney paced along the edge of the briefing room’s long table. “Grant is, I repeat, not a moron, nor is he an autistic savant. He is fully capable of understanding privacy issues. His… focus is different.”

Landry rested his elbows on the table and regarded Rodney over the edge of his folded hands.

“So Mr. Jansky is fully capable of holding a position here at the SGC?”

“What!” Rodney turned abruptly on his heel and jabbed a finger at the general. “No. No. Absolutely, no way. Grant’s one of the innocents that this whole place has been created, ultimately, to protect!”

Landry smiled. “But, ultimately,” he echoed, “it would be Mr. Janksy’s decision, since he is, as you are taking such pains to point out, capable of making his own decisions.”

Rodney’s response was succinct and to the point. “You bastard.”

 _fin_   



End file.
